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Cisco DCAUTO Exam Study Resources

About

🎓 We have many people to thank for helping us pass the Cisco DCAUTO exam, by way of using their open source contributions, blogs, and posts on StackOverflow. We have never met any of those people and likely never will, in-person or otherwise. Each of these people took time from their lives to publish something they knew or built, so the rest of us, somehow, via some search engine, could have even a slightly more straightforward path to whatever it is we want to learn.

🌄 To everyone who took the time to help the entire DevNet community, this guide is both nod of appreciation to you and also our way of paying it forward to the next person or people who, like us, feel like climbing to the top of the mountain, however strenuous, is worth the view. It would be disingenuous for us to make the climb using the ropes people left for us without leaving our own ropes to help the people who follow. We wish you success in your climb.

Overview

📋 This guide provides content and references which will help you study and prepare yourself for the Cisco 300-635 DCAUTO Exam: Automating and Programming Cisco Data Center Solutions exam. All of the information in this guide is a curation of resources that the authors used to study for and pass the Cisco DCAUTO exam.

Attention

All content in this guide strictly complies with the Cisco Certification and Confidentiality Agreement, also known as the Cisco Certification Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). We welcome and appreciate any Cisco NDA-compliant contributions from the community.

Info

  • This guide is neither affiliated with Cisco Systems, Inc. nor any of its affiliates, including Cisco DevNet.
  • All materials in this guide are contributions from the community of Cisco DevNet enthusiasts and certification candidates.
  • Any references to pay-for-use study materials are free of sponsorship, affiliations, royalties, and payments of any kind.
    • We pay for these resources just like anyone else would, and we recommend the paid resources because we think they are valuable.

Exam Topics

📔 The Cisco DCAUTO exam topics cover a variety of skills. Some of those skills are specific to Cisco products and solutions (ACI, Nexus, Intersight, etc.), while others are product-agnostic, foundational infrastructure automation and programmability skills (Git, Python, Ansible, etc.).

📚 DCAUTO is the fourth DevNet exam that we've studied for and the first where we struggled to find a curated set of resources from which to study. As we amassed notes, links, and our own code snippets, we organized everything into categories corresponding to the four sections in the Exam Topics list, so there is no ambiguity about finding the resources you need.

Getting Started

🚀 For us, liftoff is the hardest part of the study process. Getting our computers set up in a way that allows us to study and take notes always seems to take way more time than we think it will. To make that process easier for you, we tried to make the study resources in this guide as portable and consumable as possible.

💻 We think the best way to study for the DCAUTO exam is to have a great development environment, so we packaged one into the GitHub repository that supports this site. The content of the study materials doesn't change whether you use our development environment, use the files in the GitHub repository to build a development environment from source, or use your own development environment. These are the developer tools that we recommend to get started with your DCAUTO exam study:

  1. An account registration with Cisco DevNet.

    Tip

    If possible, we recommend you register with and log on to Cisco DevNet with a Cisco.com account because the DevNet labs for Cisco Intersight require a Cisco.com account.

  2. A Windows or macOS computer with the following software installed:

    Tip

    A desktop hypervisor is optional. We found value/ease in using a desktop hypervisor to run local instances of the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator although DevNet provides labs with sufficient access to UCS platforms.

  3. Your favorite terminal/shell program (iTerm, PowerShell, Bash, etc.).

    Tip

    In our examples, we use a combination of the Visual Studio Code Integrated Terminal, PowerShell and the macOS Terminal application.

Topic Navigation

Development Environment Setup
Section 1.0 - Network Programmability Foundation
Section 2.0 - Controller Based Data Center Networking
Section 3.0 - Data Center Device-Centric Networking
Section 4.0 - Data Center Compute
Appendix

Let's Do This

🏅 You're already to get started! Click this link to setup your development environment.